Well it was time to wipe the hard disk drive and look for the latest / greatest available Linux operating systems. I tried a bunch and settled on openSuSE 12.1 with the KDE desktop manager. The full details are on my web site here.
So, what does my desktop look like? Here it is:
And yes, on the lower right in the taskbar tray that is an icon for Microsoft Word 2007. Cool thing is that I do not need the Microsoft operating system to run Microsoft applications / programs!
“Google+ has some nice features, and I really like the way that sorting the friends lists was built in rather than the complete hack of an afterthought it seems to be on Facebook,” said consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack. “Unfortunately, for the moment, inertia is still with Facebook, since everyone from old classmates to my grandmother is on it.” Gooogle+ may still be in its invitation-only early days, but with all the wild excitement and skyrocketing numbers of users, it’s awfully hard to tell.
Quibbles about real-name policies notwithstanding, eager users from virtually every walk of life seem to be flocking to the new social network — even those of us who are perhaps less than entirely socially minded.
It’s not at all surprising, of course, to see your average, run-of-the-mill Facebook fan scampering over to check Google+ out. Such individuals, after all, would likely jump at any opportunity to share photos, updates and every manner of personal details with countless friends far and wide. They are extroverts, in other words, and they *will* share as often and as widely as they can.
‘We Love It So’
What’s been striking, though — at least to Linux Girl (my Favorite Linux Girl is NixiePixiel) — is the more or less positive reception Google+ is getting even among us geeks here in the Linux blogosphere.
“Those of us lucky enough to be on Google+ love it,” wrote ZDNet’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, for example. “Oh, we may get really upset about Google’s (Nasdaq: GOOG) real name policies, and how Google’s attempts to improve it haven’t gone far enough. But, we only get so passionate about it because we love it so.”
Paris Hilton may have now arrived on Google’s social network, but apparently that’s not stopping us from finding it useful for our own purposes as well.
So what is it about Google+? What is this “je ne sais quoi” that’s attracting both social butterflies and those of us who just aren’t? Linux Girl (my favorite Linux Girl) rolled up her sleeves and set out to find out.
‘It’s Not Facebook’
“Put simply, it’s not Facebook,” Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza told Linux Girl down at the blogosphere’s brand new Circles Cafe. “It has all the same privacy concerns as Facebook, but where Zuckerberg has proven himself to be an evil bastard time and again, Page and Brin have demonstrated a desire to at least do things well.”
Users are “dropped from FB regularly without explanation, for example,” Espinoza noted. “I don’t think anyone believes this is going to be a trend on G+.
“The user interface has improved just in the time I’ve been using it, and if they can keep up the pace for a few weeks then they ought to be able to sort out the most desired functionality,” he added.
3 Cheers for Circles
“I love the Circles feature allowing you to post updates for particular groups,” chimed in Roberto Lim, a lawyer and blogger on Mobile Raptor. “The J and K keys for scrolling is another nice feature.”
Lim has not used Google+ features including Sparks and Hangouts, nor has he installed the Google+ app on his phone, since it’s not yet available in his area. He also says he still relies much more on Twitter.
Still, while he doesn’t currently see any benefits specific to Linux users, “the main advantage as an HTC Android user is that it allows me to sync updates, phone numbers and email addresses,” he added, and it also “reminds me of their birthdays with my phone.”
‘My Grandmother Is on It’
Consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack was also impressed.
“Google+ has some nice features, and I really like the way that sorting the friends lists was built in rather than the complete hack of an afterthought it seems to be on Facebook,” Mack offered.
“Unfortunately, for the moment, inertia is still with Facebook, since everyone from old classmates to my grandmother is on it,” Mack added.
‘It’s Called Marketing’
For Slashdot blogger hairyfeet, trust is still an issue.
“Remember how they said, ‘Android is open!’ and then did an about-face and changed that to, ‘Android is open for handset manufacturers!’?” hairyfeet recalled. “Or how they have been asked repeatedly about ties to the NSA and refused to answer?”
Google’s “don’t be evil” slogan, in fact, is “right up there with ‘Think Different’ and ‘Windows 7 was my idea!’” in hairyfeet’s opinion.
“It’s called marketing , folks,” he said. “You know corporations can lie, yes? Then why would you trust a multinational corporation who has an interest in mining your butt and NO reason not to do whatever it wants with your data?”
In the end, though, “Google+ frankly won’t matter anyway, not unless they can somehow buy Zynga,” hairyfeet opined. “Don’t ask me why but those Zynga games are like catnip to females and the males go where the females are. The females have too much in their Farmville and Frontierville to go anywhere.”
All of this stolen from here. It is required. Doing code weaving is fun.
I was running Netflix for about a year, and suddenly they turned me off. The reason: I run Linux UBUNTU as my operating system. It was so sudden, interruptive, and down right rude, that I canceled my membership. Hey, it worked. Why pull the plug on me? Strange…
Anyway, I did a trial of Amazon Prime movies, but was disappointed in the selection there. So, I canceled the trial member ship.
What is a guy (gal) to do? Google for “Free Streaming Movies”.
Here are two great free ones that I found:
Vidxden
How I got there is still a puzzle, but this site can be navigated using Piratenz. Just follow the “Direct Links” on the right side of the page and click Vidxden. There is also a bunch of free steraming movie sites that you can try.
Veehd
Just doing some more Googling I ran across Veehd. If you don’t like DVD Rips, Look through the Tag Info and click “dvd”. You get available dvds in great quality.
It’s been a while since the four Pirate Bay founders lost their case in a Stockholm district court — April 2009, to be more precise. The verdict was of course appealed, but alas, it was not to be. A Swedish appeals court has upheld the original ruling but changed the sentencing. Three of the quartet have had their jail time reduced: Fredrik Neij gets ten months, Peter Sunde eight months, and Carl Lundstrom four (Gottfrid Svartholm was too ill at the time of the hearing; his “criminal liability” will be determined later, according to BBC News). The fine, however, has been upped from the original 30 million kronor to 46 million (US $6.4m). That’s seriously going to cut into their Black Friday shopping plans, but hey, we know a great way to pick up the Adobe suite. Well, maybe not.
Timothy Wu says we should be alarmed by the monopoly powers accumulated by Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, and eBay. Why he’s wrong
Timothy Wu, the Columbia University law professor who coined the term “net neutrality,” is not someone to be dismissed lightly, especially when it comes to communications and media trends. In his recent book The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires—and in a related piece in The Wall Street Journal—Wu argues that just as AT&T was a monopoly during an earlier phase of communications history, companies such as Google, Facebook, and Apple now hold what he calls “information monopolies” that could be just as damaging to our society.
Does he present a convincing case that this is true? Not really.
In his Journal op-ed piece, Wu asks: “How hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, eBay, and Google?” Just for the record, I routinely go days without using Amazon, Skype, or eBay and haven’t noticed any problems. I spend most of my time online. In any case, Wu says doing without Google and Amazon would be inconvenient. He goes on to say:
Forgoing Facebook or Twitter means giving up whole categories of activity. For most of us, avoiding the Internet’s dominant firms would be a lot harder than bypassing Starbucks, Wal-Mart or other companies that dominate some corner of what was once called the real world.
What Constitutes a Monopoly?
The author goes on to argue that despite the Internet’s reputation for encouraging freedom, it looks “increasingly like a Monopoly board,” with most of the major sectors controlled by “one dominant company or an oligopoly.” According to Wu, search is “owned” by Google, while Facebook owns social networking, eBay rules auctions, Apple “dominates online content delivery,” and Amazon owns online retail. But as Adam Thierer has pointed out (so has Mike Masnick, among others), none of these examples—with the possible exception of Google and search—meets any kind of serious test of the term monopoly.
It’s not clear what Wu even means by saying that Apple has a monopoly on “online content delivery.” He seems to be referring to iTunes and the control the company exerts over distribution of music, movies, books, magazines, and so on, either directly or via its mobile apps. But that doesn’t really qualify as a monopoly either: Record labels, movie studios, newspapers, and other content companies are free to distribute their content in other ways to still reach the same audience (or an even broader one), using the Web and other services.
Google probably comes closest to a classic definition of a monopoly. Not so much on the search side, but as it might apply to advertising—particularly search-related advertising, where the company clearly has a dominant position. As a result, Google has already come under scrutiny for acquisitions such as the purchase of the mobile advertising service AdMob (which got cleared after Apple bought Quattro Wireless). Others have recommended that regulators investigate the proposed purchase of the travel-information service ITA as well. Even so, arguing that Google is a monopoly is no slam dunk.
How Would Facebook and Apple Qualify?
Facebook and Apple, meanwhile, don’t really fit any definition of monopoly, unless you broaden the definition to mean “a really big company with products that a lot of people use.” It may be true that Facebook doesn’t make it easy for certain kinds of data to be exported from within its walled garden—something recently criticized by the father of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee—but that doesn’t make it a monopoly. If Facebook were a monopoly, Friendster and MySpace could just as easily have been accused of being monopolies when they were top dogs in social networking. Today, they offer proof of the fragility of such a position.
Posted by Luis Falcon on Monday November 08, 2010 @ 07:42 AM
from the dept.
I’m happy to announce the first Release Candidate version of Medical, the Free Health and Hospital Information System. This version is the result of over 2 years of hard work, and I see it as the starting point for a modern, scalable Free Health and Hospital Information System.
The highlights are :
Covers most important functionality of Preventive and Family Medicine
Fully Integrated to OpenERP 6.0
Health Center administration (human resources, financial , stock, billing, … )
Socioeconomics : Living conditions, sewers, drinking water, economic income, family members, electricity, …
Lifestyle : Exercise, hours of work, diet, sleep hours, smoking….
Sexual education and habits
Social exclusion and drug abuse indicators : Working children, sexual abuse, prostitution, teenage pregnancy, school withdrawal, …
Includes commonly used illegal drugs, by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) and their rating, addiction, tolerance, toxicity,…
Laboratory Administration
Prescription writing
Patient appointment Administration (both ambulatory and inpatient)
Inpatient (Hospitalization) Management
Vademecum : Includes the World Health Organization (WHO) esential list of medicines.
Genetic and Hereditary diseases. ( > 4200 NCBI and Diseases genes )
Incorporates the International Classification of Diseases, version 10, as well as the ICD-10-PCS ( Procedure Coding System )
Demographics and epidemiological information
The 1.0 release should be out in December, and in between we will have at least 2 more Release Canditates (RC2 and RC3).
Now it’s time to test the system, fully document the current functionality and complete the translation to the many languages that Medical is working today.
We will also take this time to add more demo data (patient clinical history, appointments, evaluations.. ).
Many thanks to all the Medical community that have contributed to the creation of the Universal free Health Information System !
We we’ll be talking about the upcoming 1.0 release and its integration to public health this friday 12th at IWEEE Brazil 2010, in Foz do Iguaçu ( http://www.iweee.org ), in Latinoware, so hope to see you there !
So you already use Twitter, but it feels like your account lacks a certain star quality. Don’t worry, your problem is solved as this list publicizes the otherwise private lives of your favorite celebs, and what could be more entertaining than reading the tweets of famous people?
Follow the name link for their Twitter page and follow away!
Once a host on the former TV channel Tech TV, Leo now specializes in technology coverage on radio, TV, and the Internet and especially likes to give out tech tidbits to his followers.
Comedian and one of those responsible for the creation of the Monty Python series. John’s hysterical writing ability definitely shows through in his tweets.
Happy following and feel free to add your own famous Twitter celebrities below!
Nixie is a girl that’s been playing video games since she came out of the womb. 22 years later I decided to share these pent-up opinions about the industry, games, my likes and dislikes and everything in between.
I also dabble with Linux and make a vain attempt at helping others dabble as well. Actually, I just like the word ‘dabble’.
How Do I Know Who Reads Or Views My Facebook Postings?
I am not new to social media. I started web sites and blogs a long time ago. All this from scratch. Basically, starting to set-up my own Web Server, picking and choosing the back end that worked for me, the having it hosted.
Obviously, the front end had to look good. Examples JJMacey.Net and JJMacey.Net/Blog. But, I drove this with the back end, and can follow who sees / reads me with Google Analytics.
Are we being driven to pure ads when we look at a Facebook page?
Back in February we wrote about Facebook’s secret Project Titan — a web-based email client that we hear is unofficially referred to internally as its “Gmail killer”. Now we’ve heard from sources that this is indeed what’s coming on Monday during Facebook’s special event, alongside personal @facebook.com email addresses for users.
This isn’t a big surprise — the event invites Facebook sent out hinted strongly that the news would have something to do with its Inbox, sparking plenty of speculation that the event could be related to Titan. Our understanding is that this is more than just a UI refresh for Facebook’s existing messaging service with POP access tacked on. Rather, Facebook is building a full-fledged webmail client, and while it may only be in early stages come its launch Monday, there’s a huge amount of potential here.
Facebook has the world’s most popular photos product, the most popular events product, and soon will have a very popular local deals product as well. It can tweak the design of its webmail client to display content from each of these in a seamless fashion (and don’t forget messages from games, or payments via Facebook Credits). And there’s also the social element: Facebook knows who your friends are and how closely you’re connected to them; it can probably do a pretty good job figuring out which personal emails you want to read most and prioritize them accordingly.
Oh, and assuming our sources prove accurate, this explains the timing of the Google/Facebook slap fight over contact information.
We’ll keep digging for more details and will have full coverage on Monday.
It all started with the French. Years ago, the Defense Ministry in Paris presented an official plan promoting arms exports. The German response? Self-imposed limits. Arms exports should be “restrictive,” according to the “Federal Arms Exports Guidelines” from the year 2000.
The situation hasn’t changed much since. In a recent issue of the financial magazine Wirtschaftswoche, an unnammed head of a German weapons manufacturer complained about the French: “We are the ragamuffins here, and they are the heroes.”
That, though, will soon come to an end.
A recent report from the commission studying the structure of the German military, led by Frank-Jürgen Weise, the head of the Federal Labor Agency, states that the German defense industry will “depend more than before on their exports and civilian use of their products.” The commission forwarded a recommendation to Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (CSU) for the “alignment of national arms exports guidelines to European standards.”
“Export, Export, Export”
Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, a member of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), is alarmed. For 11 years, she was Germany’s development minister and sat on the so-called “Federal Security Council,” a group which decided on what weapons exports to allow, and to where. Wieczorek-Zeul told SPIEGEL ONLINE, that she fears “those who are now talking about aligning with EU partners only want to find a way around Germany’s restrictive arms exports laws.” For her, the coalition agreement between Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP) only has one goal in its chapter on arms, and that is: “Export, Export, Export.”
The coalition agreement reads: “We are committed to current arms export regulations and will continue to advocate the harmonization of arms export directives within the EU. We actively support fair competition in Europe.” The idea is to remove bureacratic red tape and speed up administrative procedures.
Elke Hoff, the defense policy spokeswoman for the FDP fraction in German parliament, finds many similarities between the recommendations of the Weise commission and the proposals included in the German government’s coalition agreement. They are so sensible, she said, that they could have “almost come directly out of our coalition agreement.”
Hoff can’t comprehend why her opponents are so agitated. “If we weren’t interested in selling German armaments to friendly nations, then we could shut down our defense industry right away, ” she says. “But we want to hold on to the jobs.” In all, about 80,000 German workers are employed in the defense industry, and another 10,000 jobs are tied to subcontractors.
Trade unions in Germany are estimating that Defense Minister Guttenberg seeks to cut the German military’s procurement budget by some €9 billion in coming years. Last Wednesday, in the Bavarian town of Manching, more than 2,000 employees of the defense company Cassidian (a division of the EADS Corporation) demonstrated against proposed cuts to the defense budget. A representative from the union IG Metall warned that the cuts could result in 10,000 lost jobs in Germany.
Are arms exports to provide a way out of this dilemma?
Florian Hahn, a defense expert from the Christian Social Union (CSU) — the Bavarian sister party to Merkel’s Christian Democrats — says, “because the domestic market will shrink due to the military reforms, we must actively support arms exports. Other nations are ahead of us on this.”
In India, for example, he says much too little is being done to advertise the “Eurofighter,” the European designed-and-built fighter plane. The Indians are currently interested in buying 126 fighter jets, a contract worth more than €10 billion. The European plane manufacturer EADS is competing with the Americans, Russians, French and Swedish for the contract. Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle offered assurances during his visit to India in October that Germany has the “best and most reliable technology.”
Loosening the Strict Guidelines
The guidelines drawn up under Merkel’s predecessor Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, an SPD politician, stipulate that when it comes to weapons of war, “employment policy should not play a decisive role.”
Hahn now considers it “possible to loosen the German arms exports guidelines.” Until now, it’s been difficult for industry to adjust to the procedures of the Federal Security Council, Hahn said, adding: “One doesn’t even know when the meetings take place. I hope to see quicker and more transparent decision making.”
The weapons will not be displeased. Many of the proposals by Merkel’s government resemble demands made by the Federation of the German Security and Defense Industries (BDSV) for “support of exports.” The federation’s wish list includes:
The establishment of a “cross-departmental organizational element” within the government to speed up the process of coordination.
The easing of “access to export markets through backed international agreements.”
The “acceleration of export approval procedures from the weapons of war control law,” in order to have quicker entry into international competition.
Armaments for Export
Even with strict export regulations, Germany is the third largest weapons exporter in the world. In the past, the subject of controversial weapons sales, such as the sale of 36 reconnaissance tanks to Saudi Arabia in 1991, has come up again and again.
The Germans are only behind the US and Russia on the list of weapons exporters, and are ahead of the British and French, who are envied by German manufacturers. According to data from the respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Germany had 11 percent of the world market between 2005 and 2009. The countries owning the most weapons manufactured in Germany are Turkey (14 percent), Greece (13 percent), and South Africa (12 percent.) In 2008, the German government allowed the export of armaments worth almost €6 billion.
The existing, Schröder-era export guidelines evidently don’t present much of an obstacle. SPD expert Wieczorek-Zeul now wants to strengthen them, and is demanding parliamentary transparency on arms exports. She said the parliament should “not just be informed after-the-fact and in convoluted ways about the decisions made on exporting weapons of war.” Instead, she argues, the export of those weapons should be disclosed to the Committee on Foreign Affairs.
So far, however, she has had difficulty finding influential support.
“Eurofighter,” “Leopard,” Submarine Class 214: Germany is the third largest weapons exporter in the world, despite restrictive guidelines. Now the federal government wants to make arms sales abroad even easier to make up for defense budget cuts at home.
It’s been almost 100 years since the legendary steamship sank to the bottom of the Atlantic & researchers have been navigating the depths to find out more ever since.
Lately there have been reports of ghosts showing up in pictures.
Take a look for yourself.
SWIEBODZIN, Poland (AP) — Workers have completed a giant statue of Jesus Christ in a small Polish town that its creators say ranks as the biggest in the world.
Hundreds of residents gathered to watch a towering crane lifting the crowned head onto the top of the statue in the town of Swiebodzin on Saturday.
The statue is the creation of a retired local priest, Rev. Sylwester Zawadzki. Many local residents and business people in Swiebodzin (shvee-eh-BOHD’-jeen) say they hope it will put their town of 22,000 on the map for Roman Catholic pilgrims and bring in money to their community.
The statue’s completion had been delayed by strong winds.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.
SWIEBODZIN, Poland (AP) — Workers in a small Polish town on Saturday lifted the shoulders and arms onto a giant statue of Jesus Christ that its creators say will be the biggest in the world.
After delays caused by strong winds, a towering crane lifted the massive piece and very slowly placed it onto the lower part of the figure’s body. Later in the day, workers hoped to finish assembling the statue by hoisting the head.
Essential web services have come under simulated attack as European nations test their cyber defences.
The first-ever cross-European simulation of an all out cyber attack was planned to test how well nations cope as the attacks slow connections.
The simulation steadily reduced access to critical services to gauge how nations react.
The exercise also tested how nations work together to avoid a complete shut-down of international links.
Neelie Kroes, European commissioner for the digital agenda, said the exercise was designed to test preparedness and was an “important first step towards working together to combat potential online threats to essential infrastructure”.
The exercise is intended to help expose short-comings in existing procedures for combating attacks. As the attacks escalated, cyber security centres had to find ever more ways to route traffic through to key services and sites.
The exercise also tested if communication channels, set up to help spread the word about attacks, were robust in the face of a developing threat and if the information shared over them was relevant.
Overseeing the exercise was the European Network Security Agency which has been given new powers to help member states handle cyber security incidents. In all, 22 member states plus Iceland, Norway and Switzerland took part.
A report into how the simulation went and how different nations coped is due to be published on 10 November.
More good news is that the majority of CIOs are arriving from a heavy-duty tech background; the trend, fashionable in previous decades, of appointing a general manager to this role is looking distinctly dated. This job is T-shaped, with broad knowledge encompassing business, finance and technology across the top bar, supported by deep wells of technical competence.
The real difference between an average and stellar performance in this role however, says Adam Thilthorpe, director of professionalism at the BCS, is the ability to ‘blend’. In other words, a successful CIO matches technical ability with business aptitude.
It’s having the insight and ability to make IT the instrument of business change that elevates the modern CIO. The opportunities are there for the picking – in the music market the phenomenon of music downloads and iTunes that changed the shape of the industry, for example.
As Thilthorpe puts it: “If you’re behind the curve in technology, it’s a threat. If you’re ahead, it’s an opportunity”. All of which means that CIOs who can blend are in demand and fast becoming the rock stars of boardroom remuneration.
What type of person should you be?
The CIO is the member of the senior management team who forms the bridge between technology and the business. This calls for excellent interpersonal skills, business acumen and the ability to talk the language of the boardroom – often financial.
Having the necessary credibility stems from being a good communicator who’s robust enough to get a message across without using brute force. The technology piece is a given, not least because a CIO will typically manage more than a dozen suppliers, all of whom will try and muddy the waters about service though techno babble at some point.
A word on the difference between the CIO, the modern incarnation of the top tech job, and the IT director. A rule of thumb is that IT directors spend more time with their technical team than customers and CIOs tend to spend more time with the business.
Panellist’s view: You need to gain credibility quickly so that you are taken seriously and not just as another propeller head.
What are the first and second jobs; what’s the career path?
The first and second job can be any typical first-rung job such as programmer or business analyst but by the third, you need to think customer. A business-facing role with direct contact with business contacts will pay dividends in cultivating interpersonal and business skills.
The Drupal content management system (CMS) is one of the most successful open source projects on the Internet today, thanks in no small part to its community.
At the head of the Drupal community is the project’s founder, Dries Buytaert, who started the project ten years ago in his dorm room. In 2008, Buytaert helped to found Acquia which is a commercial support vendor for Drupal, which to date has raised over $20 million in startup capital. The road from dorm room to open source rock star has given Buytaert some insight into how to build a successful open source community. Speaking at the Zendcon PHP conference this week, Buytaert detailed six key secrets to open source success.
1) There is no quick rick formula.
Buytaert said that it took five years after he first started the Drupal project until there was the first Drupalcon developer conference in 2005. At that point, 40 people showed up to the event. At DrupalCon 2010, there were over 3,000 attendees.
“It takes time,” Buytaert said. “It took us 10 years to get to where we are today.”
2) Hurray for growing pains.
According to Buytaert, growing pains are a great thing. As an example, he cited the big Drupal server meltdown of 2005 when the primary webservers for the project literally melted. Buytaert noted that at the time, he was a student with little money, so he simply put up a PayPal button on the Drupal domain with a message about the server being down and he needed to raise $3,000 to buy new hardware.
What happened over the course of the following 24 hour period shocked Buytaert. Individuals contributed more than $10,000 to the project. The Open Source Labs (OSL) called to offer free hosting and the CTO of Sun Microsystems sent Buytaert a new $8,000 server.
“People that build commercial open source companies ask me how I built such a community,” Buytaert said. “I often tell them, maybe they should unplug the server for awhile and see what happens.”
3) Build an architecture for evolution.
In Drupal’s case evolution is enabled by having a modular workflow. Buytaert noted that every patch that people submit is a small adaptation.
Centralizing source code management is also a key part of having a evolution-ready architecture. Choosing the right language is also a critical factor.
“The fact that we use PHP and not Java has been very important to the success of Drupal as well,” Buytaert said. “PHP is a very accessible technology and that allows or encourages people to make changes.”
4) Provide the right tools.
Tools aren’t just about technology assets either but are also about the right processes to collaborate. Buytaert suggests that it’s important to replace planning with co-ordination.
“We almost have no planning, but we invest a lot in tools for people to self-organize and to co-ordinate,” Buytaert said.
5) Make money but pay with trust
According to Buytaert is it critically important to build a commercial ecosystem around open source projects. In his view, it is the fact that people are making money that gives them and their companies the incentive to contribute back to the project.
Though money is a good thing in open source, it shouldn’t be the primary driving factor for a project.
“Money shouldn’t make the decisions,” Buytaert said. “If you look at Drupal, all of the technical decisions are made based on technical merits and are made by the people that build trust.”
“Trust is the currency of open source — it is the currency of Drupal.”
6)Leadership trumps management
Buytaert stated that for Drupal, leadership is about finding the higher purpose. With Drupal the higher purpose is about democratizing online publishing and in so doing, enabling millions of people to express themselves online.
“Create an environment where everyone is both a respected leader as well as a dedicated follower,” Buytaert said. “We have a lot of leaders in the Drupal community and a lot of people feel really empowered to do what they want to do.”
Six Secrets of Open Source Community Building
“Make sure to encourage leadership, it’s really important.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
Nuclear Bunker Houses World’s Toughest Server Farm
This article was taken from the November issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired’s articles in print before they’re posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online
Deep inside the Swiss Alps, a former nuclear bunker is now the ultimate hiding place for the world’s most sensitive secrets. Wired gains access to the server farm designed to survive a full-scale military attack.
The cockpit of Christoph Oschwald’s silver Audi A8 is preternaturally quiet as he steers through the Swiss countryside towards our destination.Wired has been instructed not to disclose its exact whereabouts. It’s late June, “the longest day of the year”, Oschwald notes. It should be 25°C outside. Instead, it’s an unseasonably chilly 12°C, and the tiny village of Saanen, in the canton of Bern, sits beneath a steel-grey sky that lends an ominous air to what might otherwise resemble an Alpenland panorama on a souvenir chocolate bar.
The green valley that cradles Saanen and the near by town of Gstaad in the Bernese highlands plays host, according to local newspaper Der Bund, to the highest concentration of billionaires in the world, their chalets creeping up the piney slopes. But it’s also home to something else — a place that you won’t find on any of the tourist maps. For the past 18 years, Oschwald, 53, a retired Swiss paratrooper turned contractor, and his business partner, an engineer named Hanspeter Baumann, 55, have committed thousands of hours and millions of francs to realising their vision — the place we’re headed to today.
We pass a Tissot boutique abutting a tractor dealership before the road dives into dense forest and follows a stream. Finally we arrive at our destination. At first, it appears to be nothing more than a timber operation, with lorries moving wooden payloads around a gravelly clearing. But then we see them: three guards clad in black uniforms, berets askew, pacing at the base of an enormous mountain. The Alpine foliage above the sentry ends abruptly at a bare rock face painted in fading camo. And carved into the side of the mountain is our destination: a small, weather-beaten metal door. Once the entrance to a vast nuclear bunker built by the Swiss military at the height of the Cold War in the mid-60s, it is now a portal into what its creators claim to be the most secure and secretive storehouse for digital information in the world: the place Oschwald has christened Swiss Fort Knox.
“Sixteen years ago, nobody took us seriously,” Oschwald says. “They said to us, ‘Storing data under a mountain? Why?’” In the cheerier geopolitical climate of the 90s, it was decidedly easier to scoff at the eccentric Swiss entrepreneur, with his slicked-back hair and blinding white smile, as he extolled the data-security benefits of his decommissioned bunker. But today — with terrorism, environmental disasters and financial meltdown on the global agenda — some of the biggest players in technology and finance are buying into the facility’s promise. Oschwald can tick off blue-chip companies such as Cisco Systems, Novartis, UBS and Deutsche Bank among his clients.
The guards stroll over to greet their boss, who is 6’ 2’’ and wears a black raincoat and a dark-blue Italian suit. As he prepares to escort Wired inside, he explains how nearly two decades of work and an investment of more than 40 million Swiss francs (£25 million) transformed a decaying bunker into a fortified data repository. Swiss Fort Knox has a laundry list of features straight out of a film script. There are five security zones, a dedicated power supply, a cooling system that pumps glacier water from an underground lake, military-grade air filters that siphon atomic, biological and chemical impurities from the air, an emergency hotel, several months’ food, a conference room, and security, including face-recognition surveillance software, bulletproof plastics and vault doors courtesy of the Swiss banking industry. It is also, thanks to its original use, designed to be impervious to nuclear attack.
“We had a four-star US general who was partly responsible for the atomic-weapons programme come here,” Oschwald says as the guards look on, “and he said, ‘In America, we have a lot of space and a lot of soldiers. But I have visited a lot of sites and this is something…
After more than a quarter century of ferrying crews, satellites, space station parts and even the Hubble Space Telescope to orbit, Discovery will begin one final voyage Wednesday afternoon.
One of just two or three space shuttle missions remaining before the program’s end, Discovery will deliver the final component of the International Space Station, essentially a large storage closet, as well as more than a ton of scientific experiments, plentiful supplies and the first humanoid robot in space, Robonaut 2.
“We’re making good on our promise that we’re getting the space station in the best possible configuration before the space shuttle is retired,” said John Shannon, manager of the shuttle program.
Both history, with the retirement of Discovery and NASA’s other two shuttles likely next summer, and the future, with uncertainty over when NASA will again have a launch vehicle of its own, weigh on the space agency as Discovery’s flight looms.
“Are we reflective? Somewhat, perhaps,” said Bryan Lunney, Discovery’s lead flight director. “But we’re mostly focused on bringing the crew of Discovery home safely.”
Since the shuttle program reached a peak 2½ years ago with nearly 16,000 employees, NASA and its contractors have shed more than half that total as the program winds down. All but a few hundred will be gone or shifted into new jobs in another year.
Spaceflight champ
While much of the public attention has focused on the historical significance of the vehicles — Discovery will soon find its way into a major air and space museum – the crew said it is these dedicated employees who make spaceflight possible.
“In the end, the public is going to see the vehicles,” said Discovery’s commander, Steve Lindsey. “But for those of us who have participated in the space shuttle program, it’s really about the people, not the vehicles. We’re supported by a fantastic team.”
Discovery is the fleet leader with 38 spaceflights, more than any existing orbiter, and at mission’s end it will have spent nearly one full year in space.
In addition to launching the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, Discovery flew both return-to-flight missions after the Challenger and Columbia disasters.
During its final flight, Discovery will deliver a large module named “Leonardo,” which is about 21 feet long and 15 feet wide, giving the crew stowage space. Upon its installation the space station will be complete after more than a dozen years of construction. It will have more than 30,000 cubic feet of pressurized volume, or about the amount of space in a large four-bedroom home.
“To be able to see it all working together, as really a flying city in space, it’s really overwhelming,” said Tim Kopra, a mission specialist on Discovery’s flight and former space station resident. “I’m looking forward to seeing it flying with all of its components.”
Legless robot
The shuttle will also bring the $2.5 million Robonaut 2 – a humanlike robot without legs – to the station. Initially the robot will be used for basic tasks, such as cleaning, to ensure that it will operate safely in a zero-gravity environment with humans nearby.
“I have a young daughter, and I like to tell her that all the stuff I used to watch as a kid in terms of science fiction, the books I read, is coming true,” said Royce Renfrew, lead flight director for the space station during Discovery’s mission. “To see Robonaut finally get launched is a very exciting activity.”
But the launch is just the beginning. The robot’s builders hope to deliver legs and upgraded components that will allow it to perform spacewalks and become increasingly useful around the station.
Within the decade, roboticists hope their machines can conduct precursor missions to distant objectives such as asteroids or Mars before humans, and facilitate the arrival of astronauts.
Endeavour in February
Developed in conjunction with General Motors, the robot’s designers placed a premium on its dexterity and ability to avoid accidentally bumping crew members on the station. For now, then, it’s only an upper torso without the ability to move around independently.
“A lot of robots out there can do a lot of different dance moves,” said Rob Ambrose, Robonaut’s project leader. “And we could probably program Robonaut to dance. But we’re more interested in having a robot that can get some work done.”
NASA presently has one final shuttle mission planned, a flight by Endeavour to the space station next February to deliver an astrophysics experiment. However, a tentative budget deal between Congress and President Barack Obama calls for one final shuttle flight, by Atlantis, next summer.
That mission, which already has been assigned a crew and will cost about $600 million, would deliver food and other supplies to the station to sustain it while private spaceflight supply vehicles continue to be developed.
And then, after three decades, the shuttle program will bid adieu.
eric.berger@chron.com
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